Download templates

Notes on the AIP Conference Proceedings templates

The following downloadable packages contain the AIP Conference Proceedings templates together with the Copyright Transfer Agreement and other additional documents you may need. They also contain detailed advice on preparing your paper, including a wide range of examples showing how to prepare and style references. Before downloading any templates, please check your conference web site for instructions on the template chosen by your conference organizers.

Standard 8.5 x 11 templates

These are now our standard templates and must be used for all future AIP Conference Proceedings volumes. Please note that double-column templates are no longer supported and we ask all authors to prepare their article in single-column format only.

Preparing papers

What do you need to do?

Here are the main steps you need to follow—the AIP author template packages contain comprehensive advice and guidance.

Download your preferred template package (for Word or LaTeX).

Write and prepare your article using the AIP template.

Create a PDF file of your paper (making sure to embed all fonts).

Send the following items to your conference organizer:

PDF file of your paper

Signed Copyright Transfer Agreement

(If it applies) Copies of any permissions to re-use copyrighted materials in your article (e.g., figures from books/journals)

Points to consider when preparing your paper

Well prepared papers enable rapid publication and reduce unnecessary work for your editor. The following points summarize the key issues you need to consider, or comply with, when preparing your paper for AIP Conference Proceedings.

Do not add page numbers or headers/footers. Our article templates deliberately do not include these so please do not add them.

Do not alter the margins of our templates. They are carefully designed for AIP’s production process: Altering them can cause significant delays.

Prepare and format references with care. Please prepare and format your references in accordance with the examples supplied with the author templates and documentation.

Embed all fonts into your article PDF. The importance of font embedding is discussed in the section Embedding fonts in PDFs. PDFs supplied without embedded fonts are often completely unusable for printing or publication purposes. In such cases we have to return those PDFs to the proceedings editors, asking them to request the authors to embed the missing fonts. Failure to embed fonts can cause unnecessary inconvenience to your proceedings editor(s) and introduce publication delays for other authors—failure to provide a replacement paper may result in an article being removed from the proceedings.

Use clear, legible graphics and diagrams. Readers of your paper will be grateful. If they cannot read it they are unlikely to cite it.

Do not use copyrighted material without permission. Papers using copyrighted material without appropriate permission and acknowledgement will be excluded from the proceedings.

No 1-page papers please. 1-page, abstract-only contributions are not acceptable and will be excluded from the proceedings.

Avoid huge PDF files (10 MB maximum, ideally). For the benefit of your readers we recommend keeping your article PDF file below 10 MB. This is a recommendation, it is not a requirement.

Embedding fonts in PDFs

Font embedding: Why is it so important?

In the following notes we explain why your proceedings article PDF file needs to have all fonts embedded by you, the author, prior to sending it to your proceedings editor.

AIP Publishing performs a number of technical quality checks on all PDF files submitted to us for proceedings publication. During those checks we continue to encounter PDFs that do not have all (or any!) fonts embedded. This can result in publication delays while we seek replacement files from those authors. It is, of course, possible to re-process PDFs in an attempt to embed missing fonts, but those processes frequently fail or produce clearly incorrect results. For highly complex PDFs containing scientific and mathematical content, any attempt to “force” font embedding (by re-processing PDFs) is very far from ideal and not without risk. Very subtle errors can be introduced through complexities arising from issues such as font encoding. These errors can be exceptionally difficult to detect.

As the author and creator of your article PDF, you have the most intimate knowledge of exactly what the PDF should display. We ask all authors to carefully check their article PDF prior to submission. Perform visual inspections to detect subtle font errors and ensure that all fonts are embedded. With the wide range of tools and software that authors use to create PDFs, and the number of devices and platforms which readers use to view/print them, font embedding by authors is not a “nice-to-have,” it is essential.

Why should I care about font embedding?

Embedding fonts into your PDF file is critically important for two reasons:

1. Commercial printing companies are unable to print PDFs without the correct fonts being embedded.

Readers of scientific articles use an ever-increasing range of devices to access, view, and print PDFs—from smart phones and tablets to desktop computers running any one of a number of operating systems—and applications to view/print PDF files. To ensure that readers of your article can display and print it correctly, it is important for your article’s PDF file to be truly portable: your PDF file needs to be fully “self-contained.”

Font embedding: Ensuring portable PDFs

PDF stands for Portable Document Format and it is the word Portable that needs to be understood and interpreted with some care. It is tempting to think “Portable” implies that all PDF files, however created, are by default fully portable and will always display or print identically. Unfortunately, life is not quite that straightforward for one simple reason: fonts.

Any application or device used to view or print the text and mathematics contained in your article PDF will need access to the appropriate font data—which typically comes from two “sources”:

1. The PDF file itself: A process called font embedding—which is the only way to guarantee true portability.

2. Substitute fonts installed on the device on which the viewer application is running.

Point (2) is where you can get into difficulty. When viewing/proofing your article PDF on the computer on which it was created you may see nothing wrong: Everything looks and prints perfectly even when font data is not embedded, or built into, the actual PDF file itself. Only when your PDF is transferred to different “device environments” that do not have the same set of installed fonts or use a different PDF-viewing application will problems caused by non-embedded fonts start to show up.

A PDF-viewing application may try its best to find “correct” substitutes for any fonts which are not embedded—this might work well for simple text, but for mathematics or specialized symbols it is quite likely that it will fail: perhaps spectacularly, or in much more subtle ways. Your carefully prepared mathematics might appear “garbled” or fail to display at all; random characters might be missing when viewed or printed; or, perhaps worse, incorrect symbols are substituted, making it appear that your mathematics contains errors!

The golden rule: Just because your article’s PDF file looks correct on your computer, you cannot assume that it will always look exactly the same on any another device: You must embed all fonts and check font embedding.

Tip: A simple test is to forward your article PDF to another device and view it there—such as on a smart phone or tablet where the PDF-viewer application and installed fonts may be very different to those on your desktop computer.

How do I check font embedding?

Tools and methods to check font embedding in PDFs is discussed in numerous tutorials, blogs, and articles on the web. If you have access to Adobe’s Acrobat Pro product, you can easily check font embedding using its built-in preflight tools; however, free tools are also available. If your institution’s policies permit you to download and install software, you can use a free command-line utility called pdffonts—which is available for Windows and Linux (we are not aware of a Mac OS version):

pdffonts generates a list of fonts used in a PDF file and indicates whether each font is embedded.

Feedback on these notes

If you have suggestions for improving these notes on PDFs/fonts, please write to us at confproc@aip.org. We’d be delighted to hear from you.

Abstracting and indexing (A+I)

Where are AIP Conference Proceedings indexed?

AIP Publishing recognizes the importance of enhancing visibility and discoverability of published research through inclusion within abstracting and indexing (A+I) databases used by researchers. We support the work of A+I services by providing them with access to all our published proceedings volumes—including automated data feeds.

AIP Conference Proceedings are indexed in a number of services, including these leading databases:

The Conference Proceedings Citation Index (part of Web of Science)

Scopus (Elsevier)

Inspec

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS)

Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Do please contact us at confproc@aip.org if you believe our proceedings should be indexed within additional databases, including specialist services used by your research community.

Further notes and guidance
We welcome questions from proceedings editors and conference organizers but prior to contacting us we would like to advise the following:

Inclusion of individual proceedings, published by AIP or any other publisher, within a specific A+I system is determined by the company or organization which owns and controls that database. The commercial and/or editorial selection criteria of individual A+I services are outside the control of AIP Publishing.

The time between publication and selected proceedings being available within an A+I service is not determined by AIP Publishing. Please contact the relevant A+I service directly if you have any questions about that.

It is important to understand that A+I services evaluate each proceedings volume on its individual merits. To maximize the interest of A+I services authors and editors should strive to produce the best possible collection of proceedings papers.

Post publication charges

Does AIP Conference Proceedings allow changes to published papers?

It depends on the nature of the change(s) being requested. We must advise that we cannot accommodate requests for post-publication changes to correct minor spelling or typographical issues, or to update or add references. AIP Conference Proceedings data is widely disseminated to abstracting and indexing services and it causes considerable work, and disruption, to make non-essential updates to published work. Only in cases of genuine scientific error, or in other limited circumstances, are post-publication changes possible via the standard mechanisms of corrigenda or errata. Proceedings publications, including ours, use author-prepared PDFs for all publication and production purposes. There is no need for “author proofs” because your article PDF file will be used for all publication and production processes.

Our advice is to very carefully check your article PDF prior to submitting it to the proceedings editors.

The publication process

What is the publication process for proceedings?

Proceedings publication differs from regular journals in several aspects which makes it extremely important for all authors to follow our guidelines.

Most pure proceedings publications, including ours, use author-prepared PDF files for publication and production of printed copies.

Proceedings papers are submitted directly to the proceedings editors who manage the review process and collect together the accepted articles and signed copyright transfer forms.

The proceedings articles, and signed copyright transfer forms, are submitted to AIP Publishing (by the editors) in a single batch, rather than one-by-one as each paper is ready.

The proceedings papers are published together as a single collection (volume) of AIP Conference Proceedings.

Once the editors have collected sufficient accepted papers, or as many papers as authors are willing to write, they submit them to us in a single batch. We cannot publish any proceedings until the entire set of files submitted to us meets the requirements of our publication and production systems.

Peer review

Are proceedings papers “peer reviewed”?

AIP Publishing recognizes and understands the nature and purpose of conference proceedings and their essential role within the landscape of scientific communication. Our goal is to publish proceedings containing work that is of long-term interest and benefit to the scientific community: Articles which can be read, and cited, with confidence. AIP Conference Proceedings, in common with many other proceedings services, asks proceedings editors undertake a peer review process for all papers. For more information, please refer to the peer review guidelines.

Article length

How many pages can I write?

As an author you can write as much as you wish subject only to page-count limits imposed by your conference organizers. AIP Publishing’s fees for online publication are completely independent of the number of pages in proceedings articles and we do not impose any upper-limit on article page counts. We do, however, impose a lower-limit on page counts: we no longer wish to publish 1-page abstract-only papers. Any abstract-only paper submitted for publication will be excluded from the proceedings.

Re-use of proceedings articles

Policy on authors' “re-use” of their proceedings paper

AIP Publishing recognizes that conference papers published in AIP Conference Proceedings are frequently a “snapshot” or “summary” of an on-going work-in-progress, and that some proceedings papers may subsequently be updated, or enhanced, for publication as a regular journal article, including submission to journals not published by AIP Publishing. In principle, we have no objections to authors wishing to make fair and reasonable re-use of material from their AIP Conference Proceedings paper, provided that such re-use is in full keeping with the standards and ethics of professional scientific publishing. Journal papers derived from work previously published in AIP Conference Proceedings must contain a substantial amount of new or previously unpublished results. AIP Publishing does not support publication of any article which is nearly identical to their paper published in AIP Conference Proceedings; such dual publication, whether accidental or deliberate, can be detrimental to an author’s publication record or history. The question of an individual author’s “fair and reasonable” re-uses of a proceeding paper, or whether there is sufficient additional material to warrant a new publication, is a matter for individual journals to decide. To support and enable informed decisions by journal editors, and referees, all authors who have re-used content from their AIP Conference Proceedings paper should supply their chosen journal with a copy of their proceedings article. This should be undertaken at the initial submission stage and should be accompanied with a clear statement describing the material reproduced from their proceedings paper. Additionally, all co-authors on the proceedings paper should be fully informed of any submission of a journal paper based on the original proceedings article. AIP Publishing requests that any author(s) deriving a journal article from their proceedings paper must include a citation to their proceedings paper, whether that paper has been published or is due to be published in an AIP Conference Proceedings volume. The citation will demonstrate compliance with this policy and is in the interest of openness and disclosure.